Obsidian's Chris Avellone indicated that Obsidian just missed a bonus for Fallout: New Vegas, reports Joystiq, saying this came in a tweet from a no longer existent account, allegedly saying: "[Fallout: New Vegas] was a straight payment, no royalties, only a bonus if we got an 85+ on Metacritic, which we didn't." Sure enough, the game currently sits at 84 on Metacritic. They also note their report of layoffs at Obsidian, though these are still unconfirmed. Thanks nin.

Bopper wrote on Mar 16, 2012, 07:00:Adjusting employee bonuses according to metacritic scores? This seems like a very bad idea as reviews are (or are meant to be at least partially) opinion pieces on a product and thus can range widely. This also helps promote the kind of back-scratching that happens between publications and game publishers where good review scores are rewarded with benefits i.e. early reviews, press access and complementary handjobs.

And yet, I've heard about it before, I think its almost an industry standard at this point. I think the idea was to encourage the devs to make a better game and get better average review scores. But I don't think it always actually works out that way.

Teddy wrote on Mar 16, 2012, 07:41:Pretty much any Call of Duty following Modern Warfare, all based on the same base engine with minor alterations where the bulk of the work was on 'new' content.

You mean like how they take maps from the previous games and reuse them in the new games with almost no work on the porting of the map, and sometimes resell them in the mappacks for an exorbitant price? I agree that that is almost no work to do that.

Oh I forgot to mention that I have to use that or I get a weird stuttering effect in the game. My FPS aren't low it just stutters without it. It has something to do with timers.

Interesting, I had no idea that that Large Address Aware thing (to let the game use more than 2gb) could change how the game used timers. I don't think I saw non FPS related stuttering, but if I do, thats good to know.